Pre-Season Predictions

Staff Picks for 2010

Today we reveal the Baseball Prospectus staff predictions for the division standings and the major player awards (MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year) in the American and National Leagues. Each staff member's division standings predictions may be found later in the article. Here, we present a wisdom-of-the-crowds summary of the results. In each table you'll find the average rank of each team in their division with first-place votes in parentheses, plus the results of our pre-season MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year voting. Picking favorites for the Wild Card for the respective leagues initially might have seemed easy, since the selections universally favored the second-place team in the AL East, while all but two voters picked their second-place teams in the NL East to earn the non-division champ playoff team, but a tie in the rankings had to be broken in favor of the team named the Wild Card winner on the most individual ballots, which is sure to upset some people.

For the MVP voting, we've slightly amended the traditional points system in place that's been used elsewhere, dropping fourth- and fifth-place votes to make it 10-7-5 for the MVP Award, and the regular 5-3-1 for the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year Awards (that's 5 points for a first-place vote, 3 points for a second-place vote, etc.). Next to each of these selections we've listed the total number of ballots, followed by the total number of points, and then the number of first-place votes in parentheses, if any were received.

Will Carroll is now the second person after Buck Showalter to pick the Pirates to finish ahead of the Reds. While the Reds are maybe an 80 win team, they have FAR more talent than the 65 win Pirates. Weird prediction.

Following is the voting pattern for the Twins in the AL Central:
1st: 7, 2nd: 3, 3rd: 1, and 4th: 1

And likewise for the Rockies in the NL West:
1st: 6, 2nd: 4, 3rd: 1, and 4th: 1

Will's vote is the lone "outlier" in selecting each of these teams to finish fourth in their divisions. Is this a case of being different just for the sake of being different? While the AL Central and NL West are both likely to be competitive divisions, I have a hard time envisioning either the Twins or Rockies falling below third place in either race.

Also, is BP the only publication on the planet where the Rays are receiving more first place votes than the Yankees?

Regarding Will...
Minnesota is in the north and pretty cold so people are more likely to get sick.
Colorado's high up and it is hard to breathe and recover from injury.
So Will's probably voting based on overall team health.

He values health, and maybe figures the Twins and Rockies will suffer the worst of the injury bug in their divisions, so despite being truly superior to the rest of their respective divisions, there is not room on his ballot for these teams.

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Yet again, BP authors show their perpetual, ridiculous, unfounded faith in Billy Beane's Moneyball approach. When will you jokers return to reality and stop giving undue preference to the A's in your rankings?

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Just in case you're going to believe anything you read here just remember ...

BP writers have picked Boston (4), Cleveland (4), or Oakland (3) to win the division a total of ELEVEN times in the last five years and have been right exactly TWICE (2006 Oakland, 2007 Clev) thus far.

During the same period, one could have taken the anti-BP dumb team picks of NY CHI and LA and been right at least a total of NINE times.

Glad to see BP finaly has given up on the Indian's and A's, but those old biases die hard when they come to the Red Sox - a team that has only won the division once over the last decade.

Golly Gee Whiz!!! I'm darn sure glad yer here to point that out! Here I thought that this predictin baseball might be really hard to do and even the best at it are gonna be wrong a whole heck of a lot. But yer TINY sample size from the last decade has convinced me to never ever believe anything them pointy headed nerds at Baseball Prospectus ever write again!
Thank You sbnirish77! You've done America a service it will never forget!!!!!

I'm bearish on Pettitte and somewhat bearish on Burnett. I think CC is probably a good bet too, but I think that Javier Vazquez has been the victim of bad luck and bad defense at the wrong times, and I think that the NL/AL league difference-- while huge-- is exaggerated to the point that people act like NL numbers are AAA numbers. Vazquez had a 2.68 SIERA last year to CC Sabathia's 3.70. I'm having a hard time thinking that the league difference is that big.

Are the award predictions for who will win the award or who will deserve it? I've always assumed it's the former, but knowing the way the BBWAA voters tend to think, it doesn't make much sense to me to (for example) pick the Braves to win the NL East and Utley to win the MVP.

For my part, I picked who I thought would win it, not who necessarily deserved it. F'rinstance, I picked Teixeira for MVP since I expect him to have the most RBIs on the winningest team in the AL -- a recipe that had writers trying to make a case for him last year, and if Mauer hadn't been so ridiculously good and the Twins hadn't made a late run he probably would have won. My "deserves it" pick this year would be Evan Longoria.